


bride with violets in her lap

by casualbird



Series: baby gay zuko [2]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Break Up, Coming Out, Coming of Age, Friendship, Gay Zuko (Avatar), Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Past Mai/Zuko (Avatar), Post-Canon, Women Being Awesome, the most amicable breakup ever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-21
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-03-19 01:16:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29618367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/casualbird/pseuds/casualbird
Summary: He loves her so much it hurts. She’s wasted on him, he knows, and there is only one way to begin to make it right.Zuko ruins Mai's plans for the future. Mai doesn't mind at all.
Relationships: Mai & Zuko (Avatar)
Series: baby gay zuko [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2176164
Comments: 16
Kudos: 47





	bride with violets in her lap

**Author's Note:**

> note: in this fic mai tells zuko a slightly grody historical anecdote about a corpse. i promise, however, that i have phrased it as delicately as i could, and that it is cool and feminist. please enjoy, or enjoy not reading it if you'd rather not hear. thanks!

“So you’ve come to sweep your damsel off her feet,” Mai says, unsmiling. Her eyes barely flick up from the scroll she’s reading, and if Zuko did not know her, he’d assume he was unwelcome.

He knows her better than he knows most anyone, but still he isn’t all the way certain. She is like that, sometimes, capricious. It’s something he thinks he understands about women, that they have the right to be that way.

Maybe, though, he ought to be unwelcome. With all he’s going to say—it would be a mercy, if she turned him right back round.

Temporarily, at least. He’s nested on this for two days, now, and though it scares him, fumbles his feet like a storm at sea, it--

\--He can’t hold it anymore.

It’s only after he’s resolved this that he realizes he hasn’t answered her, that her eyes have tilted up to him again, expectant.

“I—no,” he mumbles, barely audible over the guard shutting the door behind him. “No, I didn’t.”

“Good,” she says, nonchalant like a cat, “I’m reading.”

Still, she meets Zuko’s wavering eye, pats the cushioned space beside her. Still, she welcomes him, even aloof as she is.

He thanks her, stiffly, and goes to her side. Sits down in the fits and starts of an older man, crosses his hands politely in his lap. Zuko could be holding court, for all of his unease.

Could be holding court, except for the way Mai flows down to him, slipping one arm under his own, letting her head rest on the hard plane of his shoulder.

Zuko can feel the shifting of her cheek, can picture just what tiny smile she’s wearing. Pale, like the flesh of a bitten apple. It’s enough to make him smile too, a little.

“W-what are you reading?” he says, lamely, as the silence starts to molder. 

Mai huffs, as if laughing. “History.” She speaks it plainly, but she would never submit herself to long treatises on battles of attrition, the creaking moves of money back and forth. At least, not after hours.

A little peering at the scroll confirms, when Zuko sees the characters for _corpse_ and feels a profound, radiating fondness for this girl.

And then guilt, deeper and wider, festering in all his crevices but--but can he not at least have this?

“History,” he repeats, simple and stuttering and not quite in the right cadence. He grinds his teeth with it, hopefully not hard enough for her to feel--it’s a cowardly thing, he’s done.

Cowardly and earnest, because as frightened as he is he loves her, and wants to know. Wants to know what’s in her sharp obsidian mind, always.

“Yeah,” says Mai, and does Zuko hear enthusiasm, somewhere in the dryness of her voice? Perhaps just a little.

If only for that, he’s glad he asked.

“So there was this Fire Lady, like, a thousand years ago. Kachiko, do you know her?” She says this wryly, testing him. He’s meant to know them all, went over it time and again in his lessons.

His lessons, though, were a long time ago, and while he can more or less fumble, mumble his way through all of the Fire Lords-Regnant, most of the consorts escape him. He has to shake his head.

Mai makes a breathy, haughty little sound that a stranger might not recognize as a laugh, but Zuko does.

He laughs with her, if only a little.

“She was beautiful, Fire Lady Kachiko. I mean, I haven’t seen a picture of her, but she was supposed to be gorgeous, like a doll.”

Zuko’s eyeteeth needle at the inside of his lip. _Doll_ is a weighted word for Mai, in that she must insist she’s not one.

“Anyway, everybody mooned over her since she was so pretty, but because they were so busy tripping over themselves at the way she looked,” Mai’s voice darkens, tinged with the disdain she bears for foolish men, “nobody ever listened to her wisdom. She was very wise, Kachiko.”

The word only makes him think of Iroh, of the sweetbitter talk they had, of what Zuko came here tonight to do.

He won’t interrupt her, though. Will just measure his breath, steady out the cadence of his heart. Listen, because it’s always the right choice, listening to Mai.

“It disgusted her,” says Mai, “all her life, she _hated_ it.” Zuko nods, understands. She’s tensing up against him--people will always accuse her of being dispassionate, disaffected, but it’s simply that they don’t look enough, don’t see the shades of her. Don’t see that beneath that sullen face, she’s just as bright and bloody-minded as any other girl.

He smiles at the thought of it, at the hint of a _snarl_ in her tone as she goes on. “But she showed them,” Mai says.

There’s a dramatic pause--it takes Zuko a little while to notice it, to realize that he’s meant to ask her how. But he does, and she nudges him, carries on.

“She died,” says Mai, blunt as a ceremonial sword. And Zuko’s brows knit because, well, oughtn’t that be the end?

He doesn’t ask. Mai rarely speaks so much, but when she does it’s always good.

“She died, and her family was horrified to find out her last wish.” Mai is smiling wide, now, he can feel it from the firmness of her cheek, can hear it in her voice and see it in his mind. It’s the way she smiles when someone defers to her, when she gets, as she often does, her way.

“Kachiko demanded that instead of a stuffy state funeral,” Mai tells him, with obvious relish, “her body be thrown out into the street, so everyone could see her beauty rot away.”

“And they did it. They skipped the funeral. They left her body in the gutter and she was torn apart by dogs and everybody damn well learned their lesson. That’s all.”

Zuko marvels, if not a little sickly. Mai lifts up onto her palm, turns to him, snorts.

“You should see your face,” she says, and Zuko thinks she must be right.

“Um,” he tries, “yeah. I should, Mai, that’s--”

“Raw.”

“No, yeah, it is, it--it suits you.”

And she really does smile then, full-faced and florid like a harvest moon.

There’s only a trace of irony in her tone when she sighs to him, rolls her eyes and says that that’s the greatest compliment she’s ever been paid in her life.

The thing to do, now, is to bend his corded neck. To kiss her softly, to lay his bitten lips on hers, brushstroke tender fingers on the contour of her cheek.

He doesn’t. 

Her eyes narrow. She sits up straight. The moment stops, the way a meal stops when a plate comes to shatter on the floor.

There is an instant when he thinks she is going to say something, to turn the business end of that sharp tongue on him. She doesn’t, though--just settles back against his side, tucks a loose strand of hair behind his tattered ear.

“So,” she drawls, “What did you need my wise counsel for, o Fire Lord Zuko? I love having you by the ear like this, people listen to my points so well when you’re the one who makes them.”

The story she told about the Fire Lady, Zuko thinks, is probably true. Yet another thing he’ll have to fix, yet another thing he’ll need her help for.

He loves her so much it hurts. She’s wasted on him, he knows, and there is only one way to begin to make it right.

 _There is making it quick,_ says Iroh in his memory, _and there is making it kind. Do you remember, Zuko, when I used to change your bandages? Like that._

Zuko sighs, and stings somewhere that can’t be salved, and speaks.

An inelegant _um_ is as far as it gets him. He curses inwardly, tries again.

“I don’t really need… your advice, so much. Right now.”

Zuko needs her advice like he needs his next breath, it’s just that he can’t ask her, because she is so--so bound up in this. So tangled, like the strings of puppets, but not, because they are not dolls.

Oh, how he needs her advice. He’s misspoken--Mai smiles, murmurs _oh,_ and she glitters like a cat, thinking probably--the proposal--Zuko is so _stupid._

He thinks about the brisk lift of bandage-cloth from tight tender nascent skin, and makes it right.

Just as he rehearsed.

“I-I,” he begins, dumbly--but presses on. “I’ve hurt you before.”

A sigh, emptying and heavier than air. The kind of breath he’s been learning to take all his life, faster now that he’s got the crown for ballast.

“I’m listening,” Mai says, and there is a warmth in it, something deep-red like cinnamon tea.

“I think this is the best way to keep from doing it again. Y-you said I should, uh, that I should never break up with you again, but--I have to. I’m sorry.”

She does not move away from him. If anything, she lists closer, holds him steady with her wiry weight, the calm timbre of her breathing.

“Oh, Zuko.” Mai’s voice is not unkind--nor was the silence that preceded it. It gave him breathing room, gave him time to find his feet. “I was joking when I said that.”

Zuko’s voice is smaller now than ever. “I can never tell when you’re joking.”

“I know,” she says. “That’s what makes it fun.”

Help him, Zuko laughs. It’s a stilted thing, half-made like a baby bird, but he does. Mai is a miracle worker, that she could make him do that now. He hopes she knows.

Someday he’ll find the words to tell her. Someday he’ll say it, and it will not be laced with misunderstanding, will not feed this awful _letdown._

Someday, he prays, she will know precisely how he loves her, because he does. Oh, how he does.

Just not like this.

“But you’re not mad?” he says, and his tone is as tender as the skin of a blister, as taut.

She only shakes her head, a nuzzling motion. Gentle. It’s a wonder, that she hasn’t let him go.

Perhaps she should. Perhaps it’s right and proper.

He doesn’t want her to.

“I was mad,” she murmurs, “when you ran away. I was mad when you left me.”

Zuko cringes with it, but--breathes. They have talked about this. She puts it in the past tense for a reason.

“I have better things to do, Zuko, than be mad at someone who’s being honest with me. So we’re okay.”

“But you--wanted to. Be. Fire Lady.”

Mai laughs, then, from her throat. “I did,” she says, as if it’s already been years. As if the thought of it already bores her. “But more than that, I just.” A sigh, deep and inexorably teenage, inexorably her. “I just want to be listened to.”

“And I can get people to do that without being married to _anyone.”_

It’s a challenge when she says it, a gauntlet thrown. To the court, to the people, to herself.

Zuko knows she’ll hack it. Knows that he can help, even if she doesn’t really need it.

“I’m, I’ll--promote you,” he says, hoarsely. “Any office you want. Make up a new one, I’ll--”

But Mai just shakes her head, soft-smiling. “Can I be secretary of finishing my education first?”

“Yeah,” says Zuko, half-laughing, “yeah, of course.” He’s almost envious of her, a second. His education ended at the moment of his coronation, and now he learns the way a man overboard must learn to tread water--haphazard, quick, all his movements uncertain and jerky. Boy-King Zuko, they call him, and they’re right.

He wants to sit with her, in front of Iroh or some tutor; wants to hear her thoughts. Wants to put it all together with her, like mending the shards of a vase.

But it’s not to be. A thousand lives he could have had, a thousand childhoods, gone. It’s no matter. He’s a man now, in word and deed and body, and he’ll figure it out.

He’s got her with him, to make sure that he does.

The silence between them is sweet, familiar like honeyed tea. It’s a tradition of theirs, a thing they forged when they were still together.

Well. They aren’t apart, now. Perhaps they’re more together than ever they were, Zuko muses. But mostly he just sits there, feels the rise-fall of her even breathing, tries to match it with his own.

It goes on like that for a long time, quiet, the demanding world far away.

“But Zuko,” murmurs Mai, when she figures she oughtn’t wait him out any longer, when it comes to her that Zuko won’t just volunteer. “Are you alright? I was only expecting this a little bit.”

It doesn’t feel harsh, when she says it. Mai expects everything. It is part of her genius.

“Y-yes,” he says, coltish and halting, because he is just settling into a new state of rightness, a hair’s breadth better than he’s ever been. “I’m fine but it’s also--not you.”

Maybe it’s the wrong thing to say, the overwritten thing. It’s true, though, and there is no other way to say it. Not for him, at least, with his untrained, striving tongue.

He knows she would not wither, if he never did explain. He wants to do it anyway, wants her to know. She is his advisor, now, knowing is her business.

She is his friend, and that makes it her business too.

“I talked to my uncle,” he says, and it is only a spark chipping off of it, only the tiniest of starts, but Mai understands. Nods against his shoulder. She knows him, knows his wisdom.

“I told him. I. Something I should probably--tell you.” A sigh, tremoring like the knit fingers in his lap. “Maybe you already know.”

Mai just hems softly, as if to say that that’s quite possible. As if to say she’s listening anyway, as if to say that either way, it will not faze her.

Zuko wonders, often, how she is so strong, so fluid and flexible, like leather armor--oh, he admires her. Oh, he always will.

He says it, then, because there is no other course of action.

“I can’t--It’s not you I can’t marry. It’s girls. Women. I don’t want--a wife.”

It’s fraught, still, and it catches in his throat, but it is easier, the second time. Oh, it is easier. Perhaps it will even get better.

Mai just inclines her head, shuffles closer to him. Curls her arm around his back, drapes pale wrist over waist. It is the closest he has ever felt to her.

“You might just be the last person to figure that out,” she says, gently, without judgment.

“I know,” says Zuko, almost mournfully, and she nudges him. Just lightly, just to say _you’re alright._

He can feel the smile on her face, against the knob of his shoulder. It makes his own lips quirk, scarcely, but it’s enough.

“It’s just as well,” says Mai, as if this is no revelation, as if none of her plans have come to harm. “Lucky, even, that I have someone I can talk about boys with. Ty Lee isn’t interested, you see, and Azula has terrible taste.”

“You’ll have to tell me what makes your Sokka so attractive,” she says, airily, without mind to Zuko’s protest.

And she laughs, and it catches in him like a yawn, and for a while that is all there is, all they need.

“Thank you,” he says, some time after, when the breath is back in him, when he has ceased to shake. “You’re--a friend.”

It sounds broken to his ear, a chipped plate, but she takes it anyway. Graciously, with both her slender hands. 

“I’m an advisor,” she amends, matter-of-factly. “It’s all for the good of the crown. For the Fire Nation. Very noble of me.”

She’s joking, this time he can tell. But she’s right. She is.

And when he half-laughs, when he gathers her up close and says he loves her, it is truer then than ever it has been.

**Author's Note:**

> fire lady kachiko is a real person, and this is a real story. her name was tachibana no kachiko, and she was an empress of japan in the tenth century ce. you can find a really good, very brief video about her [here!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISrDnyGRhmE) note that this video does however include a few icky drawings.
> 
> i really hope you liked this fic! i really wanted to include mai more in this narrative, since i think that so often women are sidelined in stories about mlm. also i just wanted to write more about cool women, because i love them, and about mai, because i love her!
> 
> i think this series is going to have a third part, where sokka finally shows up and zuko gets around to the business of being brave for five seconds and confessing to him. i'm not sure, however, what kind of historical curiosity sokka is going to tell him about. i'm sure i'll think of something, though!
> 
> title is from sappho 30, translated by anne carson. my copy of _if not, winter_ is a prized possession of mine.
> 
> do tell me what you thought of this, i really appreciate your feedback and support, and come chill with me on [twitter (18+)](https://twitter.com/bird_scribbles) if you like!


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